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DUNEDIN — Alex Anthopoulos knows better than anyone that this is a gamble. He’s given the keys to the vault to a player whose numbers don’t add up to a $65-million investment in the eyes of many.

The Blue Jays GM knows he’s going to take some heat for granting Jose Bautista security for life when others might have balked until there was a larger body of evidence to justify it.

Anthopoulos knows all this and he will sleep like a baby each and every night for the next five years because he knows he did it for all the right reasons.

With one bombastic season under Bautista’s belt and one season remaining before he would hit the free agent market, he was rewarded with a five-year, $65-million contract (one million buyout) that could yet become a six-year, $78-million deal through a club option. If it gets to that point, then Anthopoulos’ critics will long have been silenced because Bautista will obviously have delivered market value for every penny.

“The easy thing for me to do is not do anything,” said Anthopoulos of the deal that was forged at the 11th hour as an arbitration hearing loomed.

“The conservative approach is to let (Bautista) play it out. If he has a great season, maybe he prices himself out of what we thought made sense. If he doesn’t have a good season, well it would have been a good move not to sign him.

“But that’s not what we believe. We wholeheartedly believe in Jose Bautista as a person more than anything else. The ability speaks for itself. We’ve analyzed it up and down and the longer I’m in the game — and it hasn’t been that long — but over time and the more I’m around players, you’re betting on people more than anything.

“If we can’t bet on him, we can’t bet on anybody. That’s what it came down to.”

Of course, Bautista will be poked and prodded on this issue like some kind of lab rat. His contract has proven quite polarizing in the baseball community because of the uniqueness of his situation.

After years of part-time play and only sporadic success, Bautista found himself and his game in Toronto the past 18 months. Perhaps it was all there before but no one could coax it out of him. However it happened, he hit 54 home runs and drove in 124 in 2010, a life-changing event.

Is he a one-hit wonder? Or a late-bloomer with a repeatable skill? Time will tell but neither Anthopoulos nor Bautista have any qualms.

“I made a lot of adjustments right after I got here at the end of ’08,” Bautista said. “I went to winter ball and tried to apply them and worked on them again in spring training of ’09. I was feeling pretty good. Those changes were suggested by Cito Gaston and Dwayne Murphy. During the season in ’09 it was hard to turn them into results because I wasn’t playing on a daily basis.

“After the departures of (Scott) Rolen and (Alex) Rios that opportunity showed up and I was able to start getting some at-bats and seeing some results. After that I kept doing what was preached to me and I also perfected my mental approach and how I was preparing.”

So now he has gone from a bit player at the age of 27 in 2008, to a $65-million star 21/2 years later.

“From a scouting standpoint,” said Anthopoulos, “we absolutely believe in the player, believe in the swing changes, believe in the tools. His eye at the plate is going to allow him to age well and remain a productive player; and then there’s his conditioning, the way he takes care of himself and his body.”

More than that, Bautista has developed into a leader in the clubhouse. He leads certainly by example, with his work ethic and his talent, but there’s something else there. Bautista has a bit of fire in him that commands attention.

“Roy Halladay cared about winning and I’d say Jose is right there,” said Anthopoulos. “It’s an intense will to win that’s maybe a little more vocal, a little more extroverted, something I haven’t seen since I’ve been here. It’s not to take away from other players but it’s at a different level than I’ve seen in the past.”

And to risk letting him walk as a free agent would create its own set of problems.

“If we don’t have this player, then we’re looking for a player like this,” Anthopoulos said.

“On the free agent market for big-dollar players, I like to stay out of it. The uncertainty ... you’re going more years, more dollars, no-trade clauses, roads you don’t want to go down.

“And you don’t know the player as well as you’d like to. You’re going off hearsay and second-hand information. The comfort level I have with Jose Bautista is that I don’t worry about him. I don’t worry about how he’s going to take care of himself. I don’t worry about how hard he’s going to work. I don’t worry about how he’s going to carry himself. And from a scouting standpoint my eyes tell me that the ability is there.”

For Anthopoulos, that’s the kind of faith that adds up to a lot of uninterrupted sweet dreams.